In terms of result quality? In my opinion, based on my particular search habits:

Kagi > SearXNG > Brave > Startpage/Google > DDG/Ecosia/Bing

Everyone is going to have their own opinions on each of those companies, but from a results lens, that’s what I find to be most/least effective.

Like all Google products, they will still make a halfhearted attempt to make it as useful as they can before absolutely destroying it with ads

Guessing Edge by default sent you to Bing, no surprise the DDG results look similar, given that they use Bing under he hood. They shuffle rankings slightly, but it’s the same index.

You can also use Ecosia, if your prefer a different shade of lipstick on your pig search results.

There’s not really a strong player in the open source search space.

Mwmbl exists, but per their own readme:

The quality is a long way’s off from matching the commercial engines at the moment

Kagi provides the source code for many of their services, but is not truly open source, especially because at its core, it relies on applying its own rankings to other’s indexes.

That said, search is a space where the old adage rings true:

If you’re not paying for it; you are the product!

For what it’s worth, I find value in my Kagi subscription.

Lots of ways to do it, the most common I’ve seen are like this:

https://www.ultrashelf.com/collections/floating-shelf-brackets

Where holes are drilled into the shelves and then they’re slid onto the rods screwed to the wall. Hard to level but looks great if done right

Wanna bet my salary doesn’t go up 6.2% when they do that?

Her* salary.

Public tech funds are an amazing use of tax dollars, I would love it if we had more investment in these systems!

Public mail has protections from unlawful access, but is subject to the same search and seizure rules as everything else if presented with a lawful warrant.

The odds of a public email with true E2EE seems damn near impossible to me.

So would you be willing to pay for a subscription to prevent them from going to an ad-supported business model?

I’m gonna keep asking if people are going to keep posting:

Would you pay a subscription to use Firefox, and if no, what would you propose as a means of sustaining Firefox’s professional development budget if they lose Google’s Monopoly money?

That’s probably $5/yr, most domains are renewed annually, and the more mundane TLDs, like .com are $12-15/yr (hence $1/mo)

Personally, my wife and I each have a version of firstname@fundomain.vanitytld, as well as a shared house@fundomain.vanitytld where all of our bills and shared expenses go to.

For some modicum of privacy, we also have a forwarding domain connected to SimpleLogin that allows us to do website.catchall@forwardingdomain.com for each website where we have little trust in the owner respecting our privacy.

Assuming you aren’t spending $$$ on a premium domain, I feel like $1/month on a domain is a pretty small price to pay for the freedom to move email providers as needed.

Honest question for people in this thread:

Would you pay a subscription to use Firefox, and if no, what would you propose as a means of sustaining Firefox’s professional development budget if they lose Google’s Monopoly money?

I’ve also used some really crappy gas stoves but none have struggled that hard.

You must not be going to the right crappy AirBnBs, I’ve had gas stoves struggle to stay lit, which is not just bad for boiling water, now you’ve got a gas leak in the house!

If you really want to burn your house down flame your home wok, you can always get a handheld blow torch to do the finishing ignition. Could probably flame 1000 wok dishes for a single torch canister.

Photons cause cancer so I guess I may as well do nothing at all.